Just a quick question, perhaps someone could point me in the right direction. I was previously running windows 7 on a home built PC and then upgraded to a cheap Gateway with an i3 with processor and windows 8. Im noticing some color issues and I don't know what is going on. When friends send me photos via email and I save these photos to my computer, if I view the photos in Windows Photo Viewer I am noticing on some ( not all ) color blocking or lower bit depth issues. The photos seem off. Though it's not every photo.. just on some. If I open the same photo in CS6 *usually* it will be appear normal. I say usually, as sometimes when I do minor edits, I can actually see the the photo's colors "SHIFT" in the middle of editing. Like it snaps back and forth. Really odd. I also notice that when I am browsing in Chrome, that some photos look perfect ( for example, photos in threads here on FM ) but then I will notice some photos by different users have blocked up shadows or general colors being off. Again, that could be jpeg artifacts or perhaps the user didn't convert the image to the right color space, but it seems to be happening a lot.

It's hard for me to explain since I can't really post an example, because even if I could that example would probably render OK on someone else's machine. That best way to describe what I am seeing is that the color management profile seems OFF, though.. these photos are just standard RGB photos from various friends and family members who are using point N' shoot cameras/Tablets or iphones. Also, I did not have this problem before when running windows 7?

Chris, one possibility is the color space that the images are in. For a non color managed workflow (what you likely have), ideally all your images should be in sRGB color space. The reason for this is that manufacturers have agreed to use sRGB as the "default" color space and therefore, most systems are setup to display sRGB images reasonably well.

Many Windows apps are not color managed, whereas Photoshop is. This might explain why they look better in Photoshop than when viewed in other apps. Also with internet images, many browsers aren't fully color managed (I know that IE8 is not). Although not perfect, Firefox is currently one of the most fully color managed browsers. If you're not currently using Firefox, you might try it and see if web images look better with it.

One other possibility (longshot) is that the bit-depth on your video card is set to something less than 24 bits (perhaps 16-bit color). This is very unlikely, but is worth a check, as it would cause blocking in the shadows.